Travels, travails, and stories in Korea and elsewhere — "Been inclined to wander / Off the beaten track …. I've held my licence / It came with birth / For self reliance on this earth" – Judas Priest, "Grinder"

Category Archives: Korea

For some, writing rage/rant blogs works to preserve their sanity. Having some keys to mash on helps them deal with the pains of _____. Doing so is cathartic. For me, I’ve found that raging just means I have to love through the pain once more. It’s not cathartic, it’s torturous.

But I suppose this needs telling…

I wrote “The Chattering Vortex of Apathy” a year ago and posted it 9 months ago. Things got worse…just after I made that post, in fact. A Bible-thumping main coteacher made a powerplay and forced me to transfer schools, so I moved and got thrown in with three coteachers who were just out of college. Two were okay, but the other one only communicated via Post-Its with me. Our desks were next to each other and she was my main coteacher. Frustration ensued. Most of what I said about classes “not being interesting” came true.

left in February. Mid-contract. Couldn’t bear the mental strain anymore. Lady Buckeye and I had split up in October (amicably) and that combined with the idiocy of Korean schools had me thinking my time was finished in the country. Just getting through the day was difficult enough. I was wrecked.

My vice principal keeps an open door policy, and not just the figurative idea of always being available: His office door is literally open all the time. This would make no matter if his office wasn’t part of the larger 교무실 (teachers office), but it does because his open door does us no favors during the winter. All the combined hot air of the teachers room’s three overhead heaters goes to waste thanks to his negligently leaving the door open all day, thereby letting the frigid winter air waft its way into the room and keep us all in a state of refrigeration. As Korean schools don’t usually have central heating and Koreans usually keep the outside doors of the schools open (at least in the country) for “airflow,” the schools are basically cold all the frakkin’ time. One of the outside doors sits not 20 feet from the VP’s door. Whether he likes to keep us cold and waste heat or he just doesn’t care is yet to be determined.

The slamming doors

Holy Moses Malone do my high school students delight in slamming doors as harshly as possible. The doors clang and slam at double intervals every hour: Once to signal the end of one class and once more to signal the end of the 10 minute passing time and the beginning of another class. Much of the time, they make as much noise as possible so they can squeeze all the drama they can from their over scheduled lives. Those 10 minutes between classes provide endless delights for the petty and dramatic as well as recurring assaults on the ears of yours truly. How the doors stay intact is a miracle of engineering. Why nobody’s told them to frakkin’ stop it already, well, who knows.

Oh well. I’ll have a respite from this nonsense soon enough, for Lady Buckeye and I will be flying out to Vietnam come the morrow. Rock on and stay tuned for more.

Gluttony + selfies + Internet addiction + self-obsession + attention whoring: Broadcasting videos of yourself eating mounds of food. This is the logical next step beyond Instagram, instant messaging and Man Vs Food; and it’s sickening . And interestingly enough, it isn’t just men doing it: A cute-for-today young woman calling herself The Diva has gotten on on this, and I can only thank feminism for doing so. Thanks.

there’s an on-going trend of referring to women (especially little girls) as “princess”. personally it makes me shudder when i hear a little girl being called a princess. when a girl hears this often at such a young age fosters a huge sense of entitlement.– Dannyfrom504, “The Princess vs The Angel

Danny’s recent post brought back a couple memories from my first few months over here:

1. A Korean-American buddy saying, “Buckeye, Korean girls are similar to American girls in that many have the princess mentality.”

2. This exchange from with a 1st grade HS girl during class:

Upon seeing another girl’s pencil case with the Disney princesses on it (and the word princess) I said, “Oh no…don’t be a princess.” I’d said it to no one in particular, but one girl, whose English was quite good, perked up on hearing it and gave me a puzzled look. I said to her, “So many American girls want to be the princess.”

She nodded and considered this for a moment. She was searching for the best expression.

“But… they can’t be,” she said.

Just so, I thought. She had the right of it. They can’t be princesses because they’re ordinary girls in an ordinary small town. They aren’t royalty. And yet, like Danny explains, many of us love to foist the “Princess” labels upon girls as if it’s something they need to be.

In the time I’ve spent over here, I’ve encountered many princess types, but more have been like Soo-young above, who understand that as pretty as they be and as virtuous as they may act, they’ll never be princesses.

Use every smart phone for skeet shooting practice
Smash every mirror against the wall

Nothing brings these thoughts to the fore faster when my Wednesday morning class of high school kids saunter into the room. They all work at being overworked and yet bored to the core. How that’s possible, I don’t know, but it’s there and happening all the time.

More than once I’ve had to take mirrors away and hear the incessant sine waves of complaint. The same for phones. They shouldn’t have them anyway, but kids are cleverer than they look. They whine and whine and I look at them and say, “That’s too damned bad. You’ll survive without your phone.” And once the daily reminder of phones and mirrors passes, it comes time to actually work. Every single day involves me barking orders like a battle commander to get the little twerps to actually write and speak in English. Well, half of them anyway. The other half won’t do anything. I’ve talked with them, my coteacher and I have talked to them, and my coteacher and I have spoken to their home room teacher. All to no avail. I can’t send them away. I can’t make them serve detention. They know it, and I know it.

Perhaps this is what semester burnout feels like. I’d do best to remember my days teaching in the inner-city. At these kids aren’t threatening tire slashings and stabbings. Nobody is saying “Fuck you, Mr. Buckyeye.” Nobody’s pimping or trapping. Thank goodness for that. Yeah….I’ll take apathy and self-absorption over gangbanging any day.

I’ll post some more about that sordid era later. The days have grown a bit too busy to do any long posts, but maybe I can get something up if I go back to my old paragraph at a time style of writing that served well in college. Cheers.